I bought a James Keane LP recently - his brother Sean is a Chieftain, of course. James plays the box. He spoke of how difficult it was when he was growing up, how unaccepted playing traditional music was, to the extent that at school he would get beaten up just for playing the stuff.
Now, this is drastically different from what obtains now. How many of you have gotten the crap kicked out of you for playing music? And going even further, you could reflect on what it was like for the Irish in the 18th and 19th centuries, how downtrodden they were, and tied to the soil. These were people who by and large didn’t know any other music to begin with, who had no radios or gramaphones, no contact with any musicians outside of a ten mile radius (the distance a person could walk in a night and return home to work in the morning). The great joy in their lives was music, song, and story, passed on from generation to generation. The players who came out of that background really have this quality in their music, I think. An innocence, and heartiness, grittiness. They never sound contrived, and many of them were fantastic musicians, too.
The contrast between that and the world people, meaning us, who play Irish music live in now, is about as great a gulf as can be imagined. This world of computers, cell phones, credit cards, paved roads, electricity, TV, jumbo jets, etc. Bright colored clothing with lots of writing on it, tennis shoes from Adidas and Reebok. All of that stuff. Much of the music played now has this suburban/middle class sheen to it, too.
Does this bother any of you? Any thoughts on this situation?
Nope, doesn’t bother me. Thanks for asking, though.
As for growing up in different context, that applies to most music. The things that stick out to me that are most importantly different are:
The act of music-making as an active and social pursuit as opposed to isolated passive leisure time spent. Just the introduction of radios devastated home family music making. Many of the pianos got dusty.
THe very preciousness of sound. For most of human history, sound and music has been much more notable. We are drowned in sound now and the uniqueness of musical sound is lost. When pondering music in Bach’s day for example, folk might only hear music once a week at church, perhaps at the market or their lip-whistling or singing while working. Think how much more of an impact music must have made on somebody! We tease about sheet music here, but I sincerely believe it was easier to remember a tune on the first hearing when your total exposure to tunes was much less.
I sometimes think there is something wrong with me that I don’t spin CDs all day, especially of the beloved trad. But other times, I just enjoy quiet.
Don’t know that it ‘bothers me’, per se, but I feel a real dichotomy between two of the many worlds I live in. Spending hours per day in our recording studio, surrounded by computers and amazingly complex gear is satisfying and interesting because of the wonderful product that comes out of that studio.
But…
I tire, easily, of the necessary complexity connected with the endeavor.
I truly love to work with metal tubes and wooden boxes, strung with silver wire. A friend who died in the '80’s said it best…Harry always said that it was when you get to microphones and electronics, that things start going wrong.
My band plays in all size of venues, and we need amplification, often…How I wish we could always play, acoustic…Those jobs are the best…Keep it simple. Let the music speak…
Best.
Byll
I think a major part of the new state of things is that music is now an industry rather than a pastime. The same thing has happened to sports as well.
Amen on the amplification.
We get good results with our own PA with my son running it, but we always sound terrible when a venue furnishes the PA/soundman.
I have been trying to get our leader to charge an extra $120 to play with a different PA/soundman
Our harper had to play the harp bagpipe once since the soundman didn’t cut the resonant D down. I don’t know how she managed to do it, myself.
Fancypiper: Jump through whatever hoops you must to ALWAYS have your own sound man run the rig - whether that rig is yours, or belongs to the venue. On the other road, there are dragons…
Best.
Byll
Yeah, I always wonder if the truck outside says “Deaf Guy Sound Company.” Just remember, there is no necessary correlation between being willing to haul and set up gear with aesthetic tastes. Most of em seem to be rock guys anyway.
As for bringing yer own guy: One of the worst sound renderings I heard was when Battlefield Band brought their own guy to the Freight and Salvage in Berkeley. FS has a wonderful system, designed by Meyer Labs and they have a couple of great operators. But BB brought their own guy, who turned everything up to Coliseum levels. Didn’t get it then, still don’t. I guess we were supposed to get lost in the sound of Alan Reids synth or something. I crumpled up some napkins for the ears.
I think the destruction of music as folk art was a direct result of the invention of the means to record music and broadcast music – that is, music as a medium of personal expression has been steadily rushing downhill since the invention of wax cylinders and early broadcast radio.
Why do I say this? Because before this era music was something people participated in. Almost every family of any ethnicity or income had at least one instrument of some sort in the home and music was often a family, or even community, affair.
Before recorded and broadcast music, if you wanted music (and everyone does, in every culture I know of) you had to make it yourself or personally know someone who did. Now, 95% of the population can get better music than they could ever make, and do so instantly without all the hard work of learning to play.
Likewise, the advent of recorded and broadcast music began a period when the humble beginning musician was shunned, sometimes even by family, because they couldn’t play as well as the stars on the records. A century or so ago a budding young musician only had to play as well as his dad, or the guy down the block, to be considered pretty good – and, more importantly, to believe himself that he was pretty good. Now, a would-be young musician has to have supreme self-confidence and perserverence just to get through the initial few years of struggling to be as good as the professionals that he or she hears on the radio or CD.
This is compounded in a vicious circle because as youngsters (and their parents) saw music education in public schools as a good place to cut budgets. Which, of course, means that even fewer youngsters get exposed to making music at an early age. Etc. and so on.
In short, nowadays music isn’t “good” unless it sounds just like the record. I’ve even had people tell me, after hearing me sing one of my own original songs, that “that’s not how it goes.” 
John
Well, I had this achingly brilliant screed to torment everybody with when my server disconnected. I’d say that’s the hand of fate right there. 
Suffice it to say that my interest in trad was definitely uncool at the time of my long-past youth. I have very mixed feelings about the mainstreaming of it now, especially as applied to the advertising industry which does nothing to further ITM in a real way (not that it’s needed), but galvanizes it into a parody, I think. But that’s all the sound and fury of the vulgar, and I generally ignore it. As Byll said, let the music speak.
What I do like about the present technology is that we tradsters can be in nearer and more ready virtual proximity for it. I think that’s a good thing.
I’m not exactly sure why it should “bother” us, any more than the French oppression of Huguenots in the eighteenth century or the Japanese massacre of Chinese civilians in 1937. We’re observers of history, not participants.
Am I happy I wasn’t born in such times? Certainly. And I’m grateful to the musicians who endured the oppression and preserved the music to come down to us. But I seriously doubt that they had any such goal, any more than slaves on nineteenth century Southern plantations were consciously preserving spirituals for eventual use by Mahalia Jackson or Jerome Kern.
More thoughts on the subject…
Consider, in America the community orchestra was not uncommon even in very small towns as late as the 1940’s. This was because the elder generation at that time had been raised with little access to recorded and broadcast music, and because music was still strongly supported in the public schools.
Now, it is actually fairly rare to meet an adult under forty who took band through four years of high-school and rarer still to find one who continued to play after graduation.
I dare say that even most of us on this board play infrequently with others or for anything other than our own enjoyment (with perhaps tolerance from the immediate family).
John
Guilty as charged. I haven’t played with others regularly since high school. The upcoming SF Bay Area get-together will be the first time I’ve been face-to-face with other whistlers in a session. (I don’t count the occasional duets with my 10-year-old). I played sax in the school band for a few years, with forays into oboe and clarinet. And for a year or so I played in a recorder consort with friends - but that was over 20 years ago.
We do have a lot of music in the house, since both daughters take piano - their practice time cuts into my practice or CD-listening time, but it’s worth it. One of the college expenses we’re budgeting for daughter #1 is a decent keyboard . . .
Nice post, and food for thought.
An elder friend of mine, violin and sax (!) player, used to say:
You discover music,
then you discover Bach,
then you discover silence…
Another thing that changed music was the commercialization of ethnic music. I think especially of the “Irish” music produced by tin pan alley by writers that probably didn’t even know where Ireland was. Many of these tunes and songs are still thought by many to be the epitome of Irish music. The same thing happened to “folk” music and many other forms. When I was young there was still, in small towns, family based and local music groups that got together to play for the sheer enjoyment of playing. We had to save money to buy a single 78 RPM record. The radio was our main source of new material. Now you can download more music than you can ever listen to in a lifetime. For many young people today making music means burning a CD.
Keep whistling,
Ron
Okay…I understand a bit of where this thread started, but puhleeeze…
Rant On…
A lot of us were bullied as children for our cultural standards…Jews, Polish, African-Americans, Puerto Ricans. . .the list goes on and it isn’t limited to ANY group, music, style of clothing, accent. The Irish sure don’t have a monopoly on that.
And going even further, you could reflect on what it was like for the Irish in the 18th and 19th centuries, how downtrodden they were, and tied to the soil. These were people who by and large didn’t know any other music to begin with, who had no radios or gramaphones, no contact with any musicians outside of a ten mile radius (the distance a person could walk in a night and return home to work in the morning).
Um…NO ONE had access to radios or gramaphones in the 18th and 19th century, at least not until nearly 1890. ALL music was limited, and ALL agrarian societies had the same problems with distances. In fact the American Midwest was even more remote.
The great joy in their lives was music, song, and story, passed on from generation to generation. The players who came out of that background really have this quality in their music, I think. An innocence, and heartiness, grittiness. They never sound contrived, and many of them were fantastic musicians, too.
Oh this does put a rosy glow on it…and I’m not going to start on where you have report of an 18th or 19th musician who has been described as having a style called ‘innocent, hearty, gritty, uncontrived…’ This is what you want to believe. Fine.
The contrast between that and the world people, meaning us, who play Irish music live in now, is about as great a gulf as can be imagined. This world of computers, cell phones, credit cards, paved roads, electricity, TV, jumbo jets, etc. Bright colored clothing with lots of writing on it, tennis shoes from Adidas and Reebok. All of that stuff. Much of the music played now has this suburban/middle class sheen to it, too.
Does this bother any of you? Any thoughts on this situation?
Our current culture that allows for ‘world music’ is firmly bedded in that society that brings you the internet, CDs, live broadcast and world tours. You would never have heard this music if it weren’t for the high tech society that brought you easy travel, cheap recorded music, travelling tours and emmigration.
Rant off…
No…I change my mind…I’m still irked…
To all the Miniver Cheevies out there…you may be enamoured of the Irish music, but there is as great a tradition of music in dozens of different cultures…fiddlers in the Scandinavian style that are phenomenal at their art as anyone else…Indian players with skills that come from the old master/apprentice school of teaching…Klezmer music that is driving and exciting and approachable. But if the artists can’t reach an audience, if there isn’t a density of population to sustain the art form you’ll never hear it, you’ll never develop an ear for it, you’ll never appreciate the genius of it. And if it isn’t passed on, its lost and forgotten and replaced with something else.
I’m certainly not dissing Irish or Scottish traditional music. But to put the past generations up on a pedestal and think how tragically wonderful it all was…and isn’t it a shame that its so commercial now. . .the history is what put it on the map today. ALL the history from the agrarian basis to Riverdance, gramaphones to .mp3’s, peat fires to concert halls.
Okay. I’m going now. Really.
No…really really.
How the heck do I delete this post?
John’s comment about recorded music cuts a lot of ways…One result of our recorded music industry is the expectation of perfection in performance, by many in the public. Many years ago, my studio jumped on the multi-track band wagon, with a lot of others. This allowed magic tricks - among them the illusion of perfection in performance - that has been amplified by our current digital technology.
The result can be perfect - but sterile - recordings. Some in the public have come to subconsciously demand perfection in live performance - and that rarely happens. Again: Let the music speak - imperfections and all…
Best.
Byll
I think it’s possible to regret the loss of broad participation in music without wanting to go back to the conditions that created it.
To put it bluntly: most of the world, materially, is far better off today than it was 100 years ago. Even most of the “third world” countries.
Most of us, especially in the developed world, live in conditions that would have dazzled the very wealthiest of a century or two back.
Sometimes, we romantisize conditions of the past - but that’s, in good part, because we don’t have to live them. We see the parts we like, and ignore the hard work, poverty, misery, and disease of the past.
Even a century ago, the affluent lived a life that would seem comfortable, but 9 out of 10 did not; in both absolute numbers and as a percentage, far, far, more people can live like that today.
So although I miss the broad base that traditional music used to rest on, I want to rebuild that in today’s society, not recreate the conditions that forced it the first time around.
‘Tradition’ is an important word to consider. While it denotes cultural and historical connotations, it also does not exist solely in the past. Traditions are customs that are continued, and necessarily change in so doing. So Irish traditional music at the end of the 18th century was probably a lot different at the end of the 19th century, because of newfangled ideas about collecting - writing down and, on occasion, editing - folk music. Earlier even than that, Turlough O’Carolan - often held up as an important part of the tradition - was not in any way involved with what is now accepted as traditional Irish music. The harp tradition in Ireland was entirely separated from the dance music tradition, forming (in fact) an Irish ‘art music’ of a kind. And O’Carolan’s compositions reflect this - but also the changes taking place in that tradition: Corelli and Handel were regular visitors to Dublin, and O’Carolan’s patrons were gravitating toward the European art music tradition, so Turlough, in the grand tradition of marketing and consumerism (another tradition, you notice 
!), started listening carefully and incorporating elements of that music into his harping.
Any talk of the ‘ideal’ of Irish traditional music being in the past is crap, to put it bluntly, as is the idea that music is only valid as ITM if it conforms to the tradition as it existed in 18XX or 19XX. Each one of us can choose to play as we wish - and choosing to play in the style of Xxxx from 19XX is perfectly fine. But blanket assumptions and statements to the effect that emulating past masters is all that should be done, because the folk tradition has been changed and corrupted by consumerism/ marketing/ technology - that’s just silly.
In terms of your ideas about the evils of technology and modernism on the feel of traditional music - the players who made the first ITM recordings were in New York, a city unlike any place in Ireland, and were exploring and embracing new technology. The irony of this is that nowadays they’re held up as ‘the tradition’ - this is what everyone must aim for. As I’ve said earlier, that’s perfectly valid. But you can bet your bottom dollar than they weren’t sitting there thinking, “Well, X from Ballyxxx never played with a piano/guitar/banjo, and Y from Ballyyyy never went near any of this newfangled technology stuff… I guess I’d better not make this recording with an accompanist then, because X and Y are the tradition”. Likewise, ITM wasn’t a group tradition until the Irish in the US realised that it was easier to be heard in a large dance hall (before the era of good amplification) with 10 musicians than with 2, and also started to incorporate harmonic accompaniment - piano, double bass, banjo - and jazz instruments - saxophone - as well as louder instruments, such as the accordion - which is considered by some people, even today, to be too much of a newcomer to really qualify as traditional. Yeah right. With that in mind, surely all of the groups now lauded as fine exponents of The Tradition are not actually traditional - because they’re playing as groups. Yes? No? You decide.
For the record, I’ve just finished college; ITM sure as hell wasn’t cool when I was in secondary school. It is still a marginalised form of music, but the integration of ‘popular’ styles, as well as production values, is winning over more and more people who would laugh at recordings of Jackie Daly or Patsy Hanly on their own.
I agree with Tyghress on all points, even if she was baring her fangs a little.
Deirdre